This is the first time ive edited the vlog. I hope you guys enjoy this update. Sorry for the late post!
April/May 2018: Lots of Updates to Share
Hello everyone!
Miss me? I miss you guys!
It is now May, which means I need to do April’s blog post. Sorry for the lack of posting, but I have been doing a lot of things for school as well as personal projects which I will be sharing. I also drafted this halfway through the month and forgot about it. This will be posted around the end of may instead of Mid May. Because of this, this post will be both for April and for May. April didn’t have much since it was just Finals for my university, so its actually better I just squeeze both months into one post.
Junior Year: OVER!
My Junior year at Temple University is over. This is one step closer to the end of my undergraduate career. This semester was a very rocky one for me but I feel it spurred me back into making content for everyone to enjoy, and kept me on my toes. This semester the only notable class was Software design which allowed me to learn some more things by myself about web development. I wish all of the classes this semester were more interesting, but since I am now done all of my gen-ed courses as well as my major courses, I am free to take the classes that I am actually interested in. The fall will bring about my capstone as well as an independent study opportunity among other interesting computer science undergraduate courses. I am excited to start that in the fall.
Twitch and Splatoon 2
This April I got twitch affiliate! Normally I play Splatoon 2, but as some of you may know, I’ve done things like stream my development progress as well as playing other games. Soon I will have emotes that you all can use in both twitch and discord if you subscribe to me. They will all be Splatoon themed but that doesn’t make them less fun if you do not like Splatoon. I do my best to keep the stream as PG as possible. My twitch is: https://twitch.tv/zxRaptura
From May 31st to June 4th I will be in Wisconsin Dells playing Splatoon 2 at an event called Smash n Splash. I will be playing with my team: Depth First Squids (a reference to Depth First Search). Here are some details about that event if you are interested, including links to the official streams and such. I am really looking forward to meeting my teammates and friends, as they are from all over the United States, and even the Dominican Republic. The last week has been a proper sports team hell week, with tournaments and hard scrimmages and matches all week. We are learning a lot playing together and I am looking forward to playing more Splatoon2. I feel like I am having much more fun playing this game than when I was playing Yu-Gi-Oh. Its also much cheaper to play this game which is always a plus in my book.
What is going to happen this summer?
This summer looks good. I have already been working on one pretty large project which should be unveiled fairly soon. It is a time tracker with a Tea theme. Be on the lookout on this blog when I finally put that into production.
After all of that, I will be working on several smaller games and putting them out as fast as possible. Looking into the fall and the spring for my senior year, it is really important for me to put as much effort possible this summer in game development, as I will not be able to do any when school starts.
Aether is….redeemable. I don’t know if I want to continue working on Aether anymore. It feels like a chore to continue to spend money on art as well as code this project that I am not having much fun in completing. After a few years, it seems like a chore and I would like to just get it finished and forget about it.
On the bright side, after being able to clear my head from the last two semesters, I have a lot of ideas to work on small games and enjoy the summer. I wish to bring you guys as much content as possible. OH also I made snowcember2016’s project files open source for you guys to see on my Github.
I’ve been playing some good ol’ JRPG’s. Ni No Kuni 2 is guaranteed a spot for my top 10 games of all time. I plan on playing some of the older games on my Steam library for sure. Witcher 3 is looking like a good way to round off the end of the summer. E3 May change my mind, as Kingdom Hearts 3 is expected to get a release date. Although I don’t believe it will come out during the summer, I do expect some things like Smash 5 for the switch as well as the Splatoon 2 Octo expansion to occupy my free time.
June is looking like an amazing time to get work done, so I will be trying my best to bring you games and content made by me. Maybe an RPG of some kind? Its more likely a platformer will ASCEND from the depths this summer. Maybe something more arcade-like will rise from the ground like a GEM? Who knows?
All in all, I hope you guys had a wonderful April and May, and I hope your June is even better. Enjoy your summer everyone!
March 2018: 1 Year of Blogging!
Hey you guys, the year has been increasingly busy. It has been a full year of me blogging on this website and making content here. I’ve gone through a lot of struggles and I have learned a lot from them. The grind is never over. I feel that without these struggles I would not be the same person as I am now. The year featured about 6 months of dedicated work and interesting topics and another 6 months of deep introspection. I tried to do a lot of things this year and felt good, but many things got in the way of my plans for better or for worse. In this last year, I learned so much about myself and I would like to share with you.
So here are 10 things I wish I knew a year ago, that I know today.
- College expands your understanding of learning and it’s not where you go to make a career. (at least exclusively making a career) Careers are formed outside the classroom, and if you are like me, you can make a career and not go to college at all. But remember that the piece of paper still means something to most people. Not having a college education, at the minimum bachelors level, will reduce your chance that anybody else will find you a viable business partner (or employee).
- When you enter college, if you own a startup, or what to do outside work concurrently with school, expect to waver in your grades (Don’t do it if you are going for a 4.0 GPA). For me, I feel bad because I want to maintain a high GPA as well as maintain Gamechee. This sadly is impossible simply because of the way I think. If I focus on Gamechee, I feel guilty because I am not working on school work. If I work on school work, I feel guilty that there is no content out for you guys.
- Not everyone thinks with all the same caveats as you do. Don’t assume your ideas are bad because you see it from a different perspective. At least ask a few different minded people before you move on with your plans.
- You never realize what you truly have until its completely stripped away from you. This can include things like your own confidence to succeed, as well as physical things (Think back to when I didn’t have my laptop for a few months…)
- Don’t bar yourself from doing things because they seem silly to you. You don’t really know what you are missing. Remember to have fun and enjoy each day.
- Its okay to not know your course of action to the finer details. It’s much more important that you know what you are comfortable with and your limits. It’s also fine to look back and realize that some of the decisions you made were simply wrong, and not bash yourself for it.
- Its fine to look in the past for reference, but it’s not okay to be stuck in the past and be afraid to make future mistakes. Every mistake is a stepping stone to success in the future. It is hard to progress if you constantly take the safe route. Make those sudden leaps of faith in your career. Try to learn something new from each experience.
- Its okay to give stuff up. Plans may not always go your way but sometimes Its best to just quit while you understand you aren’t making any progress. Sometimes it’s hard dropping a project you invested so much time and so many resources into. The experience just putting in the effort is enough justification for the past you to have endured in those efforts. Take what you can from the situation and move onto bigger and better things.
- Really taking the time to figure out what is going wrong in some aspect of your life is much longer of a process than I expected. For me, it took about 6 hard months of doubting myself every day and trying to figure out what I could do to make my situation better. I now understand what I can do to help my cause. I know how I work best and I will not allow myself to be dissuaded any longer by my mistakes.
- Respect the supporters, love the haters. It’s really easy to see criticism as something similar to a personal attack. People can pick apart your decisions and call you out on them. But this isn’t so much “hating”. The hating I mean is like literal personal attacks on who you are and what you stand for. Sometimes people will never see your perspective and that’s okay. If you have an ideal you stand by, continue to stand by it. However, learn to try and see what the other person means when they say they dislike your work or your personality. Try to understand where they are coming from, because their perspective is still valid, and you can try to make something out of that experience. Don’t stress out because of the people that don’t like you, simply take the several points they stress to you and try to make something out of it that is meaningful and non-toxic.
Thank you so much for supporting me over the year. In this year alone I have learned so much about myself and strive to make something amazing out of it all. I feel energized and ready to work on new projects as the school semester comes to a close in late April. Be on the lookout for more and more projects as the year goes on.
Aether is coming soon. Don’t worry.
I hope you guys had a wonderful March. Enjoy your April. I know I will.
February Vlog Post!
This month I decided it would be better to do everything in a video, instead of doing it on this blog in the form of text. Let me know in the comments of the video how you like this content, and how I can improve.
This Month in Review: January 2018
It is now the end of the first month of the year 2018. It feels like a year has passed in this month already.
Just to remind everybody, the posts on this blog are now monthly, so I do not feel overwhelmed to grind out content every week. It also keeps the blog fresh with ideas and topics when there are good topics for me to talk about. Topical posts will be on random intervals, and monthly posts will simply follow the same format as they always have.
I hope everyone is enjoying the new year and sticking with their new year’s resolutions! This year I have been making drastic changes to my life and I want to accomplish much more this year than I have in any other year.
I started to learn how to do pixel art and I want to just keep doing that for a while. Doing art in general honestly makes me really uncomfortable, but I feel its in my best interest to do more things out of my comfort zone and really try to cover all my bases. I also started to work on Aether more and I would like to finish the project and release it by the end of February, but it seems like It will take more work, and more likely release in March. School is a huge factor in that game’s delay, as per usual. I will be working on more games for this year, all having the common theme as ADVENTURE, as I stated before in a previous post.
As for stuff I started doing in my personal life, my girlfriend and I started a jar of happy memories. Every time we do something particularly interesting or positive we put a note in the jar. Its a really good way to ensure you are thinking positively and trying to make the best of every day. The more the jar gets filled I am reminded of all the amazing memories I can look back on.
I also stopped playing Yu-Gi-Oh and card games entirely, mainly for financial reasons. Because of this, I will probably not do that Yu-Gi-Oh project I was referring to in my last post, but that is okay. I feel it is time to move on to doing something else and not inconveniencing my time and my bank account to play games like these. These games were amazing for my mental health over the last few years but I feel like Splatoon and games that I can play online can do the job for me as well. That being said, I am now playing Splatoon competitively and signed up for a Splatoon LAN tournament in Wisconsin in June. I feel like It would be an amazing opportunity to travel for these events, just as I did for Yu-Gi-Oh years prior. I will be able to meet some of the friends I made online playing a game I love so much. I am looking forward to it.
I decided I would apply for at least one opportunity per month. This includes jobs and internships, looking for grad schools, applying for a conference such as the Tapia conference I attended back in September 2017, etc. This will keep me focused on pushing forward a career for myself. I would love to also find a way to move out of my current house with my parents, and I feel like the lack of playing card games will definitely help my financial situation, but there are also other factors I have to consider before I move on with those plans.
Gamechee has a bright future for this year, but It will not come without its hardships as well. I finally got a hold of some artists who are willing to work with us and create amazing projects for the year. After Aether is created, we will be working on a game for a large amount of the year fitting the ADVENTURE theme. I will do my best to keep the team focused on the project and keep the scope small. Many of our projects have this weird scope creep issue, where we add more functions to the game over time, and the project never gets completed. From start to finish we will choose a schedule and stick to it.
Because I am nearing the end of my university undergrad career, I am doing my capstone class which requires me to do a large scale project with a team of my peers. I am not sure what we are going to be doing, but I expect many different impediments to Gamechee’s performance in creating projects. For that reason I am hoping my team can communicate with me well enough that we can get a lot of work done in my absence. I feel like with a strong team we can achieve anything and create an amazing game that many people will love. I am looking forward to working on what we decide to make in the end.
I hope January was a spectacular month for you, and I wish February be even better. Enjoy yourselves!
November and December: Where I’ve been, where I will be in 2018.
I feel like I’ve been gone for about a year, but it has only been a month and a half. November as expected has been extremely stressful. I ended up struggling in my classes as well as game development as collateral for not having laptop access for the last few months. I also ended up not being able to finish project Aether in Q4 like I wanted to. Aether will be back in its TBD release window. I am still working on it, but I need to work on a LOT of other things at the same time.
Now that finals are behind me and the semester is coming to a close, I feel like I owe all of you readers some sort of explanation for my absence as of late. I have had an extremely hard time coping with some mental blocks and some situations out of my control. I have come to realize that I do have some control over it and I just have to pace myself better for 2018 to not have these things happen to me again, or at least learn how to take control back when it is taken away from me.
The Laptop Situation
Essentially what happened in November was that my laptop which i have been using for the last 2 years finally died on me after the warranty expired. Since technology moves pretty fast I needed to just purchase a new laptop. This was especially true since trying to fix the laptop would just result in more money spent, when I could just invest funds into a new laptop. For the time being I ended up using my old laptop from 2013. The problem with this laptop was that It was barely usable. I could barely use Google Chrome on the dang thing. It was extremely hard to complete assignments for school. The laptop could not handle things like Unity for game development, nor hold Visual Studio 2017 which I used to code on and debug projects. Luckily I had my desktop to fall back on, but this would come at a steep time cost. Since I commute from school, I needed to go home immediately every day to work on projects. Normally I would just multitask and do these assignments when I could find the time on campus with my laptop, but i no longer had that luxury. I ended up giving up several things in my free time in order to keep up work (such is life).
After I could finally finance a Laptop with the help of my father, we decided to buy a Razer Blade Stealth from their website, since there was a deal on it. I was in the clear…or so it seemed. After downloading all of my needed software, Photoshop, Unity, Visual Studio, etc, after about 2 weeks of use, the laptop started having extreme screen flickering issues that rendered the laptop inoperable. I called customer support and they decided it was best to send the laptop back to them in Hong Kong for repairs. I decided repairing the laptop would be the best thing, since apparently this issue was much more common than I realized after researching it on forums. I am still waiting for my laptop to be shipped back in the mail to me to this day. (12/20/17)
Not having a laptop has really taken its toll on me. I realize I rely very heavily on the ability to do work anywhere. I do not drive a car, nor can afford one at the moment, so being able to simply pull out my laptop on University campus has driven my success for the last few years. I also literally run a business on my laptop, so it is imperative that I have a laptop at the ready with all my settings in tact so i am not wasting time.
My Mental State
Over the last few months, in honesty I’ve been very depressed. I have sabotaged myself from some opportunities that would greatly benefited me. I neglected some responsibilities that were well in my grasp to complete. I’ve spent much of my time being unproductive and procrastinating when all I needed was a push to keep me along. School in general has weighed me down as well. I am coming to terms currently with where I am and where I can be in the next few years. I am also reconsidering graduate school. School in general makes me feel like I am not free to explore my options. I feel a lack of control. However, I am also aware of what having a masters degree or PHD entails. I am also aware of the opportunities that may arise from it. Many of these thoughts have flooded my brain since the Tapia conference back in September 2017, and I am glad I am taking the time to finally process all of these thoughts.
Plans for 2018
I had a lot of time to really think about what I want to do in 2018. I am still deciding on some university goals for the next few years, but in general I am doing the following things.
- Go to as many hack-a-thons as I can with my friends (maybe 3 or 4 in 2018)
- PennApps Retro — January
- Dragon Hacks Fire and Ice — January
- Go to Philly Game Mechanics Meetings
- Game jam as much as I can bear
- Apply to 1 opportunity a month or 1 “large” opportunity every 3 months.
- This includes scholarship and grant writing.
- I’m talking Google Large.
- I need to follow up on a few of the opportunities/Internships I have applied for, Coursera /Adobe specifically.
- “Adventure” 2018
- Create adventure themed games the entire year of 2018. This can be done with the people at Philly Game Mechanics.
- I’m not going to start on this until Aether is pushed out the door. I am aiming for Q1 2018 assuming everything is going well and I don’t experience issues like Q4 of 2017.
- A Yu-Gi-Oh related development project
- This project is a secret…for now.
- Have more fun in general and stream Splatoon 2 / Development content.
- Push my Patreon page more.
- Learn how to drive.
- Overall just learn to breath and that failure is okay
Many of my plans for the upcoming year are very broad. Many of them also overlap and support each other. Some of these plans require me to drop some of the things I am doing currently. For example I will not be able to travel with my friends for Yu-Gi-Oh events, which is actually not a bad thing. With the money I have saved up not traveling and working on these things, I will be able to travel to events that actually matter, making connections. This includes going on more trips like Tapia, and maybe some game related ones as well. I will also be able to focus on my mental state and take breaks.
Additional Announcements
- We still have time to do Snowcember and I am gathering a team currently to work on some sort of RPG title. Look out on my twitter or twitch for more information
- Twitter: @GamecheeRaptura
- Twitch: twitch.tv/zioraptura
- Blog posts will resume!
- There will be no more weekly blogs however.
- There will be some sort of month review every month.
- If there is an event or interesting topic I want to talk about, I will post it on a blog at a non scheduled time.
- These changes allow me to not stress out about producing text content, as I was having some issues posting every week in the past.
Closing Remarks
My goal is to see myself succeed and build my confidence. When I fail it is extremely had for me to look back and see the successes that brought me to where I am today. It is a weakness that I have been working to curb for an extremely long time now.
I hope that your 2017 has been amazing and that 2018 is even better. May you have attainable new years resolutions and try to straighten yourself out, as I am attempting to do as well. Thank you for your patronage.
This Month in Review: October 2017 — Impediments, Stress, Responsibility
October 2017 proved to me that I need to really oversee things myself if I want to expect progress. Many impediments this month in regards to the production of Aether. Some of the issues were just other responsibilities catching up with me, as well as responsibilities of those people I rely on to create content catching up with them. Some other reasons were just due to stress of those responsibilities and falling back on things that make me happy instead of working on being productive and moving plans forward. (I played a lot of Splatoon 2 this month…) That being said we are clearly backed up on Aether and I am seeking more help with finishing the project.
Because of all of this, and the fact that I need to focus on all of these things until the release of Aether, I will not be posting blog posts this month. Hopefully this will be the only month I will have to take a break from blogging, but blogging proves to be quite stressful when you have to worry about a million other things.
Some other things randomly happened this month that really made it hard to do any type of school work or coding for Gamechee, as well as simply focus. My laptop ended up having several issues that is rendering it inoperable, and because of that I have to do everything with my desktop at home or on my phone. I am a commuter and it takes me a long time to get to and from my university, so you can imagine how detrimental this is to my productivity. The majority of my time working on Gamechee stuff since I’ve entered university has been on that laptop in between classes.
Some brighter news: I am thinking more about Adventure 2018, and my goals are to make one really polished small game, as well as several smaller games for game jams and things of the like. I have some ideas already for what that polished small game will be like and how I want to present it. A lot of what I would like to focus on next year is game feel and how the users will receive the games we make. We want to make the process smoother for our users and players, as well as making quality content. I will speak more about these things when the new year arrives.
TLDR: No blogs in November because I am stressed out. Impediments are making it so Aether is back at that TBA release status. Laptop is dead and I need to invest in a new one.
I hope this month was great for you, and I wish the next one will be even better!
Political/Gaming Parallelism: Power & Influence — Changing “The Meta”
It is painfully obvious to me how easy it is to influence people with power. A lot of that can be seen in online gaming as well as politics. My goal for this post is to talk about the gaming aspect and leave you to interpolate the political aspects of this issue for yourselves.
In many competitive games there is this concept called “the meta”. The meta essentially is the most commonly/best played strategies in a game. Many people who are great at the game typically define this meta, as players who want to be on the top of the game try to play the game in the guidelines of the meta.
Influencers of the game (I.e sponsored or top players) have influence over the meta as well as how people perceive it. If the talk about parts of the meta in a positive light, the other players will most likely see it as positive. However influencers can use their power to strategically manipulate the player base. Take for example strategy A which is currently meta, and strategy B which counters A but is not meta. In a broad sense, the player base has a choice to make: do we shift to using strategy B to counter strategy A? Or do we realize that strategy B gets countered by strategy C? This essentially is where these influencers come into play.
Let’s say one of the top players of this game is playing strategy A. They have the option to speak their opinion on what is considered “undervalued but good” in the game. The can say that strategy C is actually extremely undervalued and that it works extremely well against strategy B. By saying this, other players may be drawn to strategy C, removing the interest of those who player strategy B, therefore making strategy A more viable.
This is all conjecture to be honest. However if you play trading card games like yugioh, pokemon or hearthstone then you may know of people who do this.
Politically this is seen in manipulation of social interests. By drawing people to other more pressing matters, it can change the decision making for voters. Many political propoganda do this: focus on a controversial social topic to remove the focus from voting for vision and action to focusong on one (relatively small) topic.
Sorry for the lack of blog posts lately. Ive been constantly sick and trying to get work done for university.
I hope you all had a wonderful week. And I hope next week will be even better!
Ideas and Scheduling Quick Post
This post will be shorter than usual. I am simply going to put out a tentative timeline here for the next few months and what I would like to accomplish. Of course like any schedule I make i cannot be certain on the exact dates or times that these things are to happen. This post is also a ramble of notes
End of October
- Finish Aether game mechanics and gameplay, code clean up
November (Under the Guise of Codevember)
- UI and flow clean ups, demoing phase
- Marketing campaign for Aether
- Release the game (FINALLY!)
December 2017
- Start new large scale project
January 2018
- Beginning of adventure 2018
I have access to Amazon Web Services so I am looking to using that for some of that work for Adventure 2018. One of my friends suggested making an MMO using the AWS. I had plans to work on a small social media project. I am not sure yet. These are all just ideas
Tapia Conference and my “Focus”
As you may know, last week I went to the Tapia conference, a conference that celebrates Diversity in computational fields in Atlanta Georgia. I talked to many different companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Adobe to name a few. It was an amazing conference. I went to many interesting panels, mainly the ones about AI and Machine learning. I also talked to different university representatives to talk about plans for graduate school. I am looking at many different schools in the country to make an informed decision.
While I was at the conference I had the privilege to talk to many of my peers about my passions and my ideas for my own future. Of course I received mixed results.
Some of the people who I told i wanted to find a way to marry Robotics, Video Games, AI and Education praised me for it. Others made me reevaluate my goals and challenged me about my ambitions. Some of those challenges were well met. I explored myself deeper and got to explain my passions. I defended them as best I know how to. Sometimes I was told I was just trying to rope people into the group. I was even told once “If you have nothing to show, why hand me a business card?”
As ambitious as my goals may be, I believe it is best for me to continue to work towards the path of that greatness. This journey is not a sprint. I am not trying to develop video games to simply make a quick buck. In fact the last 5 years of me developing games, was me constantly failing and learning to improve upon that failure. I develop games because I believe the video gaming medium is actually a great way to convey information as well as entertain people.
My focus for the next few years is to continue to take those 4 broad topics and marry them together by doing small projects and learning more about the 4 topics and my own interests. I don’t believe my efforts are in vein. Although some people may think I currently lack a focus, I don’t believe that is the case. Although I am currently in the stage of my life where I want to explore more and more, I think i have found a path to success in something that is interesting to me, albeit a bit niche
I hope you guys had a wonderful week, and I hope next week will be even better.
Raptura 